Peter Greenaway is at it again, fabricating baroque art on a tiny budget, and making satirical points about the very establishment that has little time for his voice any more. His last film, 2007’s effortful Nightwatching, was about Rembrandt, and was intended as the first in what he calls his “Dutch masters” trilogy. This one is narrated by the 16th-century printer Henrik Goltzius (Ramsey Nasr), who’s seeking a means of publishing his pornographic woodcuts.

The first long scene involves Goltzius’s petition to the Margrave of Alsace (F Murray Abraham), whom he attempts to seduce into funding a new printing press by offering to dramatise his book’s erotic situations for the benefit of the court. In the Greenaway tradition, it’s literate and funny and quite filthy, not least because of the margrave’s predilection for publicly defecating at 6pm every evening. For the remainder of the film, Goltzius’s company and the playwright Boethius (Giulio Berruti) re-enact various sexual taboos for an increasingly scandalised audience. The theme – censorship as moral hypocrisy – is as obvious as it was in Philip Kaufman’s Quills, but Greenaway at least has the gumption to push the boat out, nudity-wise, giving us sequences of carnal role-play from Old Testament sources, and whisking away the fig leaf. The running time is a major hindrance, and the film’s video-installation look can’t compare to Greenaway’s lavish peak in any way, but it’s certainly one of his friskier, wittier films this side of the millennium.